Pinelopi (Penny) Koujianou Goldberg is the William Nordhaus Professor of Economics and Global Affairs at Yale University. She served as Chief Economist of the World Bank Group from 2018 to 2020 and has held leading roles in the profession, including President of the Econometric Society and Editor-in-Chief of the American Economic Review. She is member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and International Fellow of the British Academy. She is also recipient of the A.SK Award, the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and Sloan Foundation, and the Bodossaki Prize in Social Sciences. She is Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Distinguished Fellow of both the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and the Center for Economic Studies (CES) in Munich, and serves on the Executive Committee of the Bureau of Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD). She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University and a Diplom in Economics from the University of Freiburg, Germany.
Goldberg is an applied microeconomist whose research is motivated by policy-relevant questions in trade and development. She has employed a wide range of methods—from structural estimation of industry equilibrium models to reduced-form techniques—to study the determinants and consequences of trade policy, the links between trade, poverty, and inequality, intellectual property rights in developing countries, and firm behavior in international markets, including exchange-rate pass-through, pricing to market, and international price discrimination.
Her research has extensively analyzed the large trade liberalization episodes in developing countries, highlighting how market structure and competition shape the effects of trade. In joint work with De Loecker, Khandelwal, Pavcnik, and Topalova, she showed that India’s trade reforms in the early 1990s spurred product innovation and delivered large welfare gains, primarily through tariff reductions on imported intermediates (QJE 2010). These reductions lowered firms’ costs substantially, but the gains were only partially passed on to consumers, resulting in higher firm profit margins (Econometrica 2016). In other work on Latin America, joint with Pavcnik, she documented limited labor reallocation across industries and/or regions following major trade reforms and empirically investigated several mechanisms through which the integration of developing countries in global markets has impacted the income distribution and poverty in these countries (JDE 2003, 2004; JIE 2005; JEL 2007).
In her Presidential Address to the Econometric Society (ECMA 2023), joint with Reed, she examined how access to large export markets, domestic population size, and income inequality interact to enable (or inhibit) poverty reduction and has argued that global trade, paired with domestic redistributive policies, is essential for poverty reduction and economic development.
Goldberg has developed industry equilibrium models to examine the effects of strategic trade policies as well as the reasons for incomplete exchange rate pass-through and pricing-to-market. Her 1995 Econometrica paper “Product Differentiation and Oligopoly in International Markets: The Case of the U.S. Automobile Industry” introduced micro-level consumer data to the estimation of industry equilibrium models and provided a framework for estimating the effects of trade policies, e.g., U.S. restrictions on automobiles in the 1980s, in the presence of imperfect competition. The paper was the first work to empirically examine the role of consumer heterogeneity, firm heterogeneity, and variable markups in explaining why consumer prices often respond little to exchange rate fluctuations. In joint work with various coauthors (Hellerstein, Knetter, Verboven), she extended the approach used in her Econometrica paper to other product markets and data from multiple countries (e.g., several European markets) to analyze pricing-to-market, international price discrimination and market integration (ReStud 2013; ReStud 2001). She showed how a combination of variable markups and local non-traded goods can explain why the prices of the same, internationally traded, products are often significantly different across countries (for example, the prices of the same automobile models were significantly different across European countries in the 1990s). Goldberg has argued that variable markups, while present, are insufficient to explain the international pricing patterns in the data. Imported intermediate inputs and local non-trade goods play an important role.
In her work on trade-related intellectual property rights protection (TRIPS), joint with Chaudhuri and Jia (AER 2006), Goldberg argued that the main effect of TRIPS enforcement in pharmaceuticals in developing countries would be to restrict availability of new drugs in these countries rather than to raise prices. She made the case that there is no justification, either on theoretical or on empirical grounds, for harmonization of intellectual property rights protection across developed and developing countries (JEEA 2010).
In joint work with Maggi (AER 1999), she empirically assessed the Grossman-Helpman “Protection for Sale” model, finding that welfare considerations carried far greater weight in U.S. trade policy (during the sample period) than political contributions—a result that has shaped subsequent research. She has also studied third-degree price discrimination in automobile markets (JPE 1996) and the effects of U.S. fuel efficiency regulation (JIE 1998).
During her tenure at the World Bank, Goldberg oversaw the World Development Report 2020: Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains. She contributed to efforts to improve the measurement of human capital in developing countries (Nature 2021, with Angrist, Djankov, and Patrinos) and of legal discrimination against women (AER: Insights 2020, with Hyland and Djankov).
Goldberg has also contributed to the study of globalization’s reversals. Her analysis with various collaborators (Fajgelbaum, Kennedy, Khandelwal, Taglioni) of the 2018–19 U.S.–China trade war documented its aggregate costs to the U.S. economy, its uneven regional and sectoral effects, and the creation of new export opportunities for “bystander” countries—underscoring the complexity of global trade reallocation (QJE 2020; AER: Insights 2024). More recently, her work has focused on the resurgence of protectionism, economic nationalism, and industrial policy, with particular attention to subsidies, learning-by-doing, and cross-border spillovers in key industries such as semiconductors (Brookings Papers of Economic Activity (BPEA), 2023).
In parallel, Goldberg has studied the economic implications of gender inequality. In joint work with Chiplunkar, she has examined how gendered laws and barriers in entrepreneurship and labor markets constrain women’s economic participation, and how these distortions hinder growth in developing countries (ECMA 2024). Through initiatives such as the Global Gender Distortions Index, she and her collaborators (Gottlieb, Lall, Mehta, Peters, Lakshimi Ratan) quantified the economic costs of misallocated talent and highlighted the global growth potential of greater gender equality (World Bank Wo. Paper 11184).
Her current research investigates the changing nature of global trade and its implications for economic development, industrial policy in semiconductors, and the interplay between trade and informality, specifically the effects of trade liberalization in the presence of domestic distortions, such as labor market frictions, excessive regulation, and imperfect enforcement, giving rise to informal markets (ECMA, forthcoming).